Promoting a new blog can be quite daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. As you might expect, breaking down blog promotion into small, actionable tasks eliminates the mental road block you’ve probably experienced when trying to wrap you head around how to get people’s attention. You don’t have to do everything in this list, and some items will have a greater effect then others, but every tactic will at least drive some traffic, and any traffic is better than no traffic.
Content
1. Write a list of over 100+ resources or ideas.
2. Write the definitive guide to something. Spend time making this awesome.
3. Release a manifesto.
4. Release 2 manifestos.
5. Interview cool people. People like talking about cool people.
6. After your articles are indexed in search engines, break them up into smaller articles and submit them to ezinearticles.com (and other article directories).
7. Or just pay someone to submit the articles for you.
8. Write a list of all the cool blogs and people in your niche.
9. Check out the most popular content on high trafficked blogs. Create similar content but applied to your own niche.
10. Start a page.
11. Make that page awesome.
12. Start a group.
13. Make that group awesome.
14. Create a Facebook app for your blog.
Fundamentals
15. Wait. After you’ve taken action it can take a short while for traffic to arrive.
16. Be patient. Some bloggers may seem like overnight successes, but if you look back in their archives, they’ve been creating content for a long time.
17. Motivate yourself.
18. Read The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing.
19. Have an interesting story and overall purpose.
20. Embrace the Law of Reciprocity. Everything you give will come back exponentially.
21. Make blogging easier.
22. Take action every day. Just get one important thing done every day and eventually you’ll start getting traffic. The more you do each day the faster your blog gets traction.
23. Find people with blogs at a similar level to yours and help each other out.
24. Turn off your computer, do some cool stuff, turn on your computer again and blog about it.
25. Understand the importance of context.
26. Be consistent. You don’t need to blog every day but try to stick to at least some sort of schedule.
27. Make it a numbers game. Decide upon a definite plan of action (eg. 20 blog comments per day, 1 guest post per week etc) and stick with that.
Online Video
28. Create videos and distribute them through tubemogul.com
29. Or for wider video distribution trafficgeyser.com may work for you (expensive though).
30. Respond to YouTube videos with your content.
31. Include your full blog address at the TOP of your video descriptions.
32. Take your time with devising video titles and tags.
33. Convert your video to multiple formats, with slight editing changes, and upload it to video sites multiple times, targeting different keywords. The content remains the same but you can test what videos and titles work the best.
34. Buy the accounts of popular YouTubers and then add your blog address to the descriptions of their videos.
35. Start the first live show in your niche (Ustream, Justin.tv and LiveStream are popular choices). Make sure you record the shows too so they can be distributed as a podcast later on.
Other Blogs
36. Be the first commenter on the posts of popular blogs. But still provide value.
37. If you can’t be the first then comment anyway. But try to be the first.
38. Stumble and Digg cool blog posts you find and let the blogger know via a comment. If you have something worthy on your blog, they’ll probably reciprocate.
39. Use google.com/blogsearch to find fresh blog posts and then leave intelligent comments.
40. Link to blogs of a similar size. They’ll notice and then good stuff may happen.
41. Write a guest post for a large blog. You may not always get published, but when you do the traffic spike will be significant.
42. Write a guest post for a small blog. You’re more likely to get published and build relationships with the next wave of A-List bloggers.
43. Write some more guest posts. Can’t hurt, that’s for sure.
44. Join a blog network.
Paid
45. Start a StumbleUpon Ads campaign.
46. Get reviewed.
47. Buy some ad space.
48. Send out a press release.
People
49. Attend relevant meetups.
50. Tell your friends and family about your blog. Have them tell everyone they know.
Podcasting
51. Start a podcast and submit it to the iTunes directory.
52. Convert audio files to video files (just use Windows Movie Maker or iMovie) and send them out via tubemogul.com
53. Submit it to some other podcast directories.
Search engine optimization
54. Write linkbait.
55. Have any video or audio content transcribed and posted to your blog.
56. Register your domain name for 10 years.
57. Take advantage of sites scraping your blog’s feed by interlinking posts. Simple way to get deep inbound links.
58. Use Thesis.
Social networks
59. Join every social network you can.
60. Or, just join a couple and be really active.
61. Become active in relevant ning.com communities.
62. Convert blog posts to PDF files and submit them to Scribd — include your blog url in the description and document itself.
63. Add your Scribd documents to relevant groups.
64. Submit your best posts to blog carnivals.
65. Join relevant forums, add your blog address to your signature and start posting intelligently.
66. Sign up at ping.fm and use twitterfeed.com to auto post your latest blog content to a bunch of social networks.
67. Create lists on Amazon.com
68. Write reviews on Amazon.com
69. Better yet, create video reviews for Amazon.com
70. Answer relevant questions on Yahoo Answers, leaving your website as the source.
71. Or on Mahalo Answers.
72. Or even through LinkedIn Answers.
73. Start your own Slinkset, and feed your RSS feed into it automatically.
74. Submit your site to alltop.com
75. Write an article aimed at Digg (okay, that article won’t help much).
76. Also, befriend one of the many Digg powerusers.
77. Create a new thread on a forum and write up a really great guide with no self promotion. Simple way to be seen as an authority figure and to elicit comments on your writing (don’t forget that signature link though!).
78. Submit your content to dofollow social bookmarking sites.
79. Or have Bookmarking Demon do it for you (certainly a bend in ethics though).
StumbleUpon
80. Become an active stumbler to understand what stumblers like.
81. Friend people who stumble your content (they may just want to stumble more in the future)..
82. Have other people initially submit content (or “Discover” it as it’s known).
83. Place a Stumble button in your post template.
Su.pr
84. Sign up at su.pr and use it for all your short url needs.
85. Post content to your Facebook and Twitter stream.
86. Install the WordPress plugin to automate the process.
87. Identify the times that result in the most clicks and schedule tweets for them.
88. Setup your blog as a promoted website.
Twitter
89. Include hash tags (#tagname) in your tweets.
90. Search for your niche and answer any questions people have.
91. Place a Retweet button in your post template.
92. Follow relevant, popular, and interesting people.
93. Send @replies to relevant, popular and interesting people.
94. Tweet links to your content at multiple times during the day.
95. Love a product from a company that’s on Twitter? Review it and they may just notice and tweet about the review. It’s happened to me.
96. Sponsor some tweets.
97. Find cool people in your niche who live nearby and organize a tweet up (a meet up where you invite anyone on Twitter).
WordPress
98. Install All In One SEO Pack.
99. Automatically ping lots of ping services.
100. Create a theme, include a link to your blog in the footer, and then release it for free.
101. Create a plugin and release it for free. Add a link to your blog within the admin area. If it’s a good plugin people will love you for it.
Thanks for this list. I actually have been searching for a list of things to do in order to promote a couple of my blogs but without a whole lot of luck. It is quite difficult as we only have so much time in the day so thank you for compiling this list because I will be referring back to it a whole lot.
I dont have words to appreciate your work. Its simply amazing that you summarized huge information in this place. I think these tips are more than enough to bring huge traffic to blogs. Thank you.
Very cool post! Just one concern about publishing the blog posts in multiple places (like free article sites and so on). That has the potential of getting you flagged for duplicate content… Perhaps if wisely combined with an article spinning tool you could avoid that…
But overall very cool post, lots of good info!
Stumble thumbs up.
Gotta say it’s a great post.
While I already knew most of these there were a few I didn’t know anything about. Of course that’s par for the course with online marketing. Always new things to find, and old things you overlooked.
Thanks for the new tips.
Absolutely awesome information. I was just wondering how much information gathering might have happenned to publish such systematic and almost practical tips (though some of those are for more professional bloggers who have technical skills on web). Overall.Nice post.
Thanks David
Thanks for the tips. I believe you have covered promoting a new blog comprehensively. I totally agree with you on spending more time on your blog to achieve more and better results in terms of traffic. I am a new blogger and I have been spending a lot of time on promoting my blog and this has proved to be very productive.
Bravo David.
This is a great list through which I realised some simple actions could really help promote a blog such as tip #49 and # 50.
A times, the importance of giving the blog url (written or on a business card) is not felt at the moment but could turn to give meaningfull results…
Hey, this list is really giving me much benefits! Thanks a lot. 🙂 Having no regret to read all this. Keep it up and great work!
I don’t want to waste more time to get another information. I am very delight to surf in your site. Just keep up the good job
Wow what an awesome list!
So much to do! Thanks David.
I think I’ll post a link to it on my blog. This is info that needs to be shared!
Lots of great tips. Just getting a brand new blog going this morning, and I’ll be implementing as many of your pointers as I can. Thanks! (#37 – Done!)
This is an awesome post, Bookmarking it.
Thank you! I keep searching for a fresh new list with some unique ideas and yours has it. Putting them into action right now.
Hey,
Great article. Was really helpful, concise and informative.
I’ve already started to follow your steps.
Could you tell me in your opinion if opening a fan page and sending all of your friends invites and then posting links through that is an effective strategy?
Cheers
Lasith
You Label -http://yourlabel.blogspot.com
Awesome post. I have recently developed a blog and am really excited about it. I am trying to be as regular as possible in posting useful information. I have also been regularly finding some real stuff that will work to promote my blog. I guess after reading your article I am just going to follow it and see if it works. How to get people to guest post for my blog. Should I find blogs in direct niche or related industry? Please highlight.
Who knew there would be so much to learn when I decided to start blogging! I still have a long way to go; so I really appreciate your taking the time to put this list together. I found some really good ideas that I plan on putting to use! Vickie
Excellent post. I have stumbled this and will be coming back to read and re-read this post. I already do a lot of things on the list but equally I don’t do a lot of things on the list! I will change that from now on….
Good work
Excellent resource in itself. Bookmarked and favourited for when I have time to go through it 🙂 Like a lot of people I’m suffering from information overload these days 🙁 Posts like these need to come with a spare brain to help absorb it all.
BB
101 Ways to Promote a New Blog. The list which you mentioned here in the post is really incredible. Although, I know some the tactics to promote a new blog but, there are some important.
1 thing though, because my last comment wasn’t very helpful 😛
Not All-in-One .. Headspace is much better.
..has given great SEO for my 25-part Ubuntu setup Bible, for example, resulting in a top Digg/Tech spot.
..and yes, that was a little shameless!
Nice content it would be helpfull for me .I am impressed your website . Its layout is very attractive .Thanks and keep on working.
A fantastic list, although I’d recommend guest blogging at any stage when growing your site, as it gets your site known in the community. You also get a chance to write about something you wouldn’t normally write about on your blog by broadening your subject matter.
Dan
These are all incredible ways to help promote a blog! Getting the word out about a blog is key and having different strategies to do so is also a big part to being a successful blogger!
With different types of social media out there on the Internet, utilizing those sites can be very key in promoting a blog. Being a blogger myself, I do send post links through Facebook and Twitter as a way get the word out about my blog. After doing the blog for about a month, I was a bit surprised when a couple of my friends told me they started bookmarking my blog and read it on a daily basis! I don’t think that would have happened if I didn’t utilize social media as part of my plan.
Nice 101 Ways to Promote a New Blog i really try to on my personal blog if i hope its promoted after using all this way if have any problem i will contact you bye leave reply thank for this tips.
Well, Blog carnivals site is not updated for more than 2 years and I wonder why the link appears here!
This is indeed a great list of ideas for promoting a new blog, sometimes we get so caught up on pinging technorati or commenting on blogs we forget there are other ways of marketing our sites. I especially like the idea of creating themes for bloggers. It can be a really good way of getting a backlink and also doing something that other bloggers will thank you for. There can never be enough themes for bloggers because we all have different ideas of what we like.
Complete Ways.
Need more time to complete the action almost 101 days or more
What an awesome post, loads of great suggestions. Thanks for sharing. Will definitely try some out for my blog 😉
this article is really great…
was a pleasure to read ;D
Thank you very much. Very helpful for a new blog like mine.
An excellent and very useful list, which will be very useful for me as I’m fairly new to blogging. I will have to bookmark this list for reference. Thanks for compiling such a comprehensive list.